Angela Altieri

Angela Altieri (Flo Mingo to her fans) slipped away from us just over two weeks past her fiftieth birthday on May 16, 2005 at a hospice near Hamburg, Germany after a ten year battle with cancer. It's hard for me to write objectively about Flo. I am still in love with her twenty years after we broke up as a couple and the Silver King Band parted ways. We met and fell in love in 1975 as art students in Florence, Italy. We both graduated from Eckerd College in St. Pete a year apart and headed out to bohemian San Francisco in 1977. For her 23 birthday I gave her a book on bicycle touring in Europe and low and behold, summer of 1978 we took off and did just that for over a year. How many people would up and do that? We settled back in St. Pete in fall of 1979. I became involved with the organization ROOTS-Regional Organization of Theatres South- and Angela- then a waitress at Aunt Hatties- came into contact with performing arts people of all kinds and liked it. Her visual art training was stalled at the time. I was performing with a medicine show revival and had been invited to perform at the Festival of Fools in Amsterdam 1980. One of the guys in our troupe could not make the journey and I cajoled Angela into donning a washboard, singing, and performing.baptism by fire at an international theatre fest! She was a natural performer blessed with a wonderful voice. The medicine show ended and Angela and I took off on yet another bicycle tour of Norway that summer. We used her washboard (manufactured by the "Silver King Washboard Co.") as a rack on the back of the bike, as a table, as a percussive instrument and, oh yes, as a washboard. One thing led to another and I was hired for a month to play in Horton, Norway. Angela sat in a couple of nights and the owners of the club insisted we stay an additional month with Angela as part of the show. It was during this time she began to blossom as a performer. Upon our return to St. Pete we ran into Rock Bottom at Circus McGurkis 1980. Nick Danger and the Heat- a band Rock had formed- had fired him. I asked him if he wanted to play music with us and tour Europe. He said yes. Our first gig as the "Silver King Band" was on New Year's Eve, 1980 at the Big Apple West. Our collective philosophy was that if you combined craftsmanship with showmanship you didn't need the usual musical instruments (guitar, bass, and drums) to win and hold an audience. Rock and I were such bizarre cartoon characters on stage that I believe the audience related to us through Flo Mingo. She was a natural entertainer; blessed with a strong voice, excellent rhythm, graceful stage presence, and a streak of exhibitionism. She also "got it". Too many musicians think they have to be playing lots of notes all the time. Flo inherently understood the Miles Davis dictum, "play the notes that are not there". She'd pull back from a serious scrub rhythm to just nail a backbeat for a while. To spare us from the hard rat-a-tat-tat of thimble on washboard she pioneered the use of drum brushes. She wore out so many washboards we finally took one apart and dipped it in chrome. Then, Eddie Kirkland took it home and carved out three holes in it with a pocket knife and wired it with three little mics he had snagged from old 1960's cassette recorders. Viola, the first electric washboard? It was the last washboard she ever needed. Her visual arts education found direction through her costume choices as well as the decorating of her washboard. We were just so different and obviously having such a good time performing, people both stateside and in Europe embraced us. We spent half our time in Europe and the other half in the Tampa Bay area. We were not really interested in starvation tours of the greater USA and never really attempted to branch out over here. For me the downside of her rising career was the adulation from her male fans and the affairs that followed. I believe it eventually led to our breakup as a couple as well as a band. She found a good man in Joerg Hoffmeyer- a psychotherapist based in Hamburg. After dealing with me and Rock for five years I guess there is some symmetry there. We parted ways as a couple and a band in 1985. She formed the Hokum Hepsters later that year using the Reverend Billy Wirtz on piano as well as Chief Billy and Rose Romance and toured Northern Europe. They actually got mo' better press than Rock's new band "The Cutaways"- of course, she could wiggle in ways that Rock Bottom couldn't. I think it was important for her to prove to herself that she had grown enough as an artist that she could fly without me and Rock. After the success of that brief tour, she stopped performing for a while and concentrated on family, becoming a mother when her son Shawn was born in December, 1986. She was living in Germany and pregnant with him when Chernobyl happened. Hmmmm.cancer..makes you wonder? After a short hiatus to care for her newborn son and husband, we revived the Silver King Band on a sometime basis in 1988 and she began playing with German based blues players as well. Two worthy German based bands she performed with regularly over the last decade are "The Mudsliders" with Steve Baker and Dick Bird and "Bluesphoria" with Henry Heggen and Brian Barnett. Both bands released excellent compact discs. Blues veteran and childhood friend of Muddy Waters, Eddie Boyd dubbed Angela "Queen of the Washboard" in 1983 and it's hard to disagree. I'm proud to have been able to get past our breakup and come to cherish her new family. I'm also proud to have helped her discover and nurture her performance abilities and to have shared the stage with her (and Rock). I'm sad that she will not be around to relive and laugh at the many mutual personal memories we had in our travels. I'm sad she leaves a grieving son and husband. And I'm sad that we all are denied her talents as a performing artist, a caring, loving human and what more might have come. She would have enjoyed knowing how many people have come forward since her death to vouch for her influence on their artistic lives. I cannot believe that after twenty years her passing grieves me so. .... Barry Cuda